which it was found) in the pages of
that periodical.

Various reasons have been assigned for this rash act, all more or less
contradictory. According to some he was a man of equable temperament;
while others, who knew him personally, have told us that he was nervous
and subject to terrible fits of depression. Some would trace the act to
his quarrel with A Beckett; but this is simply absurd, seeing that it
had occurred some two years before. We need not, as it seems to us,
travel out of our course to seek the real cause, which was probably due
to over-work. His energies had been tasked to the utmost to keep pace
with the supply which his ever-increasing popularity brought him. The
state of his mind appears to us clearly indicated by his design of _The
Dying Clown_, one of the last drawings which he etched for the "Pickwick
Papers," and for which we must refer the reader to the _original_
edition only; anything more truly melancholy we can scarcely imagine.
Entirely appropriate to the story, it seems to tell its own tale of the
morbid state of mind of the man who designed it; it is a pictorial
commentary on the sad story we have attempted to tell.

[Illustration:
ROBERT SEYMOUR. "_Pickwick Papers._"

"THE DYING CLOWN."

_Face p. 233._]

A too zealous application to work has destroyed many men both of talent
and genius; it produces different effects in different individuals,
according to their respective temperaments: while it drove Robert
Seymour to frenzy, it killed John Leech--a man of far finer imaginative
faculties--with the terrible pangs of _angina pectoris_. Differently
endowed as they were, both belonged to the order of men so touchingly
described by _Manfred_:--

"There is an order
Of mortals on the earth, who do become
Old in their youth, and die ere middle age
Without the violence of warlike death;
Some perishing of pleasure, some of study,
Some worn with toil, some of mere weariness,
Some of disease, and some insanity,
And some of wither'd or of broken hearts;
For this last is a malady which slays
More than are numbered in the lists of fate."[107]

The coadjutorship of distinguished artists and authors has led to more
than one strange controversy. Those who have read Forster's "Life of
Dickens" will remember the curious claim which George Cruikshank
preferred after Dickens' death to be the suggester of the story of
"Oliver Twist," and the unceremonious mode